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Uptown Lafayette rises like a familiar haunt through the water-spotted windshield and Marty stares straight ahead, letting the air conditioner blow cold on his knuckles where his hands are wrapped around the steering wheel. The pink scar on his collarbone is itching to high hell but he won’t reach up to scratch it, only winces a little as he cranes his neck around to check a blind spot before merging into the lane that’ll lead them into the hospital parking lot.
Rust is sitting shotgun, fresher-faced and a little more steady on his feet than the last time they were out this way. His eyes are slanted out the passenger window, thumb idly worrying at the inseam on the knee of his jeans as he watches brick building and beige stucco blur past in a long smear.
Marty glances at him from the corner of his eye, sees the sharp angle of a familiar jawline and softer greying waves, cropped short again but still long enough to push your fingers through. Ever since Rust walked out of the barbershop fifteen years younger and about ten pounds lighter, it’s been something like tripping headfirst into a split-second mirage every time he blinks too fast, like catching echoes of the past heat-rippling in old mirrors.
They kissed for the first time a week and four days ago, and that’s the main thing that yanks him back out of that place between ‘95 and when it all went to hell in a handbasket, out of trailer park jungle and dreams of dead women haloed with switch grass and ten-point crowns.
A week and four days since the first. Marty’s been counting.
“We’re gonna be late,” Rust says over the low hum of the radio, and when Marty looks away from the asphalt again the other man’s eyes are cut toward the digital display on the dash. Three minutes til eleven, the surgeon’s outpatient office is through the lobby and four floors up, and there’s one long stretch of sidewalk between the lot and the sliding doors that’s going to lead them headlong through the heavy hand of Louisiana summer.
Marty doesn’t say anything about how it took ten minutes of talking Rust out of snipping and pulling his own stitches out with boiled fingernail clippers before they could get in the car and go. What he says instead is, “If I’m remembering right, a little over two months ago you had a hunting knife sunk hilt-deep in your gut and couldn’t hardly walk or piss on your own for about half that.”
By the grace of God there’s an empty spot near the front not flagged with a blue handicap sign, and Marty swings right into it before jamming the car into park, finally turning to look at Rust head-on as he pulls the keys out of the ignition.
“Call me crazy," he says, "but something tells me they’re gonna cut you some slack.”
* * *
Rust’s been down the sterile white hall and behind a closed door for a quarter-hour now. A woman with tired eyes and a bun full of wispy curls had called his name at the mouth of the waiting room, and he’d merely gotten up from the seat next to Marty, half-turned and briefly touched one finger across his brow in departure before following slowly in her wake.
“You want me to go back with you?” Marty had asked in a low voice a few minutes before that, and Rust had given one solemn shake of his head without ever taking his eyes off the mid-morning talk show running on the TV against the far wall.
“Don’t need you to hold my hand, Marty,” he’d murmured, running his palms over his thighs before they dropped together in the spread between his legs. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, showing off the puckered line of new skin seaming the broken wing of an old black bird together. “Won’t take more than five minutes.”
A couple weeks prior, Marty had sat in this same hospital in a different waiting room downstairs, alone and anxious enough that he kept reaching up to press two fingers high on his chest, feeling twelve raised sutures beneath soft cotton t-shirt. He’d stared at the ceiling while the nurse’s hands had cut and pulled, thought hard about telling a joke that never quite touched air even though she was bright-eyed and pretty, and then done nothing but smiled and pulled his shirt back on before nosing the car toward home.
They’d had etouffee for dinner that night. Not that Marty remembers because it’d been anything particularly special or first fucking class, but because halfway through peeling a bowl of shrimp Rust had padded into the kitchen on bare feet until he was standing next to Marty at the sink, reached up without a word and pulled the neck of the other man’s shirt down and aside until he could see the pink scar outlined with little pinpricks of red where the stitches had been.
Marty stood there frozen with a half-peeled shrimp in his hand, breath gone too-light while Rust gently ran the pad of his thumb over the mark before letting the fabric go, sniffed once and taken a step back to cant his hip against the counter.
“Hmm,” he’d hummed lightly, eyes at half-mast. “Doesn’t look half bad now that the black’s clipped out.”
“Scuse me?” Marty said, already back at work peeling shrimp a mile a minute, eyes dropped heavy somewhere down in the sink. “Was it really so pressing that you couldn’t wait for me to rinse my fucking hands off?”
Rust blinked. “Your hands are dirty.”
“Well yeah, but—Jesus, Rust, just—just do me a favor and go check the rice,” Marty had said, swallowing tight while he waited for Rust to pad over to the stove.
The evening sun was slanting pink and orange watercolor through the kitchen window, but that didn’t have much of anything to do with the warmth climbing high up his throat, bleeding out hot from the tender spot where Rust’s thumb had been a few moments before.
* * *
“You all set?” Marty asks, leaning forward in his chair as Rust steps back into the waiting room, clutching a folded wad of papers in one hand. “Got your follow-up all squared away?”
“Yeah,” Rust says as he walks right on past the appointment desk, leaving—in some nimble sleight of hand maneuver that Marty only barely catches inside a blink—the packet on an end table topped with a stack of magazines and an unruly potted plant. “Let’s go.”
“Slow your ass down, you ain’t ready to run any marathons just yet,” Marty half-hisses, glancing over his shoulder at the papers and a few pairs of curious eyes as he makes to follow in Rust’s wake. “What the hell did you just cold drop?”
“Aftercare instructions,” Rust says, slowing up when they get to the elevator doors. He pushes the button with a thumb and then takes a half-step back to watch the numbers on the floor display buzz and slowly rise.
Marty feels the muscle in his jaw twinge hard on reflex. “And you’re not planning on needing them?” he asks as the metal doors slide open. “Suppose you’re healed up right as rain, couldn’t give two shits about y—”
“This ain’t the first time I’ve been sewn back together, Marty,” Rust drawls, stepping into the elevator and finally cutting his eyes over. One corner of his mouth twitches up a hair, just enough to give him away. “Beside all that, I don’t figure I need to worry too much with you working my case like you are.”
Marty wants to hit the stop button, crowd Rust up against the wall with a knee between his legs and kiss that look right off his face. He clears his throat instead and stays on the far side of the elevator, twisting the ring on his right hand. “Could stand to stop at the store on the way back. What you thinking for dinner?”
He doesn’t really expect any genuine answer because that’s the way it usually goes. For all his tasting colors and shit it’s funny how Rust isn’t too picky about what he puts in his mouth, but as they step back out into the main lobby he’s right at Marty’s elbow and squinting at the midday sun coming in soft through the skylights.
“Haven’t had it in a real long time,” he says, easy enough, “but French toast sounds alright.”
They pass back out into the daylight burning hot on the blacktop and Marty watches the breeze card warm through the grey-bitten waves on Rust’s head, so light now they almost shine gold in the sun.
“Breakfast for dinner,” he murmurs while they hop a curb and trail through a mulched planter, thinking back to a different pilgrimage that was more slow-going with Rust pressed heavy and trembling against his side, journeyed under black night instead of yellow sun.
They touch down on blistering metal and Marty squints over the roof of the car as he pulls his door open, watching Rust put a cigarette between his lips and hold a flame to the tip.
“French toast. Yeah, we can do that.”
* * *
Things happen differently between them in the dark, but they’ve started to push up and out into the daylight, trailing beyond the sunken middle of night and four walls of a single room.
Maybe it was inevitable, some kind of predestined shit. Maybe they’d been headed in this direction all along and finally slipped and fallen into the verity of it. Marty doesn’t know what it means, but maybe the part of him that wants to cut line and sinker feels smaller than the part of him that wants something else.
Rust still can’t hardly go two nights straight without waking up in a cold sweat with strange words on his tongue, half-panting and wide-eyed in the dark until Marty reaches across the mattress and touches his shoulder. Only ever the shoulder at first, and he’d been surprised somewhere in that first week when Rust had simply rolled over and turned into him without a word. He’d hissed a little as his stitches pulled tight but slid in close until they were pressed flush together, chest to chest, and Marty’d held him. He’d wrapped his arms around him and held on tight, because it was Rust, and because he knew.
The kiss that came later had been unexpected. Gentle and sudden and punctuated with the rasp of stubble and lips softer than he’d have imagined, considering the words he’d heard fall from them for seven years, but it’d also been easy. Easy enough that neither of them found reason to stop once they’d gotten started, and one kiss had turned into two, then three, and then hands and mouths roaming feverish and unbound in the dark until they’d coaxed and dragged one another over the edge into release, breathing hot and damp in odd-matched time.
Outside the fast-learned rigmarole of helping another man bathe, walk, and tend the crooked ragdoll seam holding him together, there have been lingering hip touches in the hall, soft-brushing fingers, moments spent standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink rinsing and drying dishes even though Marty’s had a goddamn dishwasher since he moved into the place. TV movies watched while pressed together on the couch, slanted together like two old drunks trying to stay upright even though there hasn’t been a beer in the house since Rust’s second morning home.
And sometimes Marty thinks back to Audrey and Macie in grade school, toting home lima beans nestled in egg carton cups that Maggie would set on the kitchen windowsill in the sun. The days would slide by unnoticed and then a tiny green sprout would finally push up through the soil, delicate and alive and something brand new unfurling one little bit at a time.
Rust would laugh if he knew Marty thought about sentimental shit like that. He almost wants to tell him, maybe, just to be able to hear it.
* * *
They fire up the skillet while Rust beats four or five eggs into a mixing bowl, tines of a salad fork clinking harsh against the glass because neither man has ever bothered scrambling his eggs any other way. There was a fresh loaf of French bread at the grocery that Marty slices in lieu of the pre-sliced stuff kept on top of the microwave, and Rust had leaned against the cart as they navigated the aisles one by one, pointing out things Marty had never thought to buy inside the realm of his one-man life: finely powdered sugar, vanilla extract, a little jar of cinnamon, real maple syrup in a goddamn jug that costs about six dollars extra, the likes of which he complains about under his breath at checkout.
Rust coats either side of the bread in some eggy mess of his own devise and fries each piece up golden, tipping his head and lifting up the edges with a fork before flipping it in the pan. Marty gets some turkey bacon going despite Rust’s lip on the notion and boils up some grits he’d had in the back of the pantry for God knows how long, and pretty soon the kitchen is warm and alive with the sound of sizzling, a soundscape he hasn’t really found himself in for a good long while until he’d come back home one night with the other man in tow.
“You like your bacon chewy or crispy?” he asks Rust, trying to recall if he’s ever asked this question before while he pushes the meat around in the pan.
“Don’t know if I like any kinda bacon that looks like that,” Rust says from the corner of his mouth, loading up a plate with the third piece of French toast. He’s got his shirt untucked and unbuttoned over his wifebeater, standing there hunched at the stove with his gut pushed out, still just as lean and rawboned as Marty ever remembers, though it hadn’t been until he’d seen Rust with his clothes off and gotten his arms around him that he’d been able to make the call.
They plate up when everything’s done and sit down at the kitchen table, dig right in without a word while the sweet smell of syrup and hot grits lingers heavy in the air. Most meals usually run quiet if the TV’s not on, and unlike the butter-thick silence that used to settle up in between them in the car in the early years, it doesn’t feel like too much of anything but something comfortable now.
“Everything up to your standard?” Marty asks after a few moments of clinking utensils and Rust’s first cursory bite of turkey bacon.
“Not bad,” Rust says, forking another piece of toast. “Bacon ain’t too bad, either.”
“Better for you,” Marty says, thumbing at the corner of his mouth as he reaches for his glass of tea. “Don’t imagine you’ve got a lick of cholesterol in your body but I don’t suppose it’d hurt in the long run in terms of putting you on the mend.”
Rust’s eyes are cut low toward his plate as he stirs a pat of butter into his grits, voice edged casual. “I don’t think turkey bacon is gonna fix any of the damage that’s already been done, Marty.”
Marty cringes when his knife scratches sharp across the plate but Rust doesn’t bother to look up, busy now shaking a few drops of tabasco into his bowl.
“How about something to fix your bad attitude?” he asks, letting his hands and utensils smack against the table with a thud. “Constant upward glances, Rust—how about that?”
“Yeah,” Rust says after a moment, taking a sip of lukewarm coffee. “Maybe.”
They fall back into silence after that. Rust finishes his food and sets his plate in the sink before stepping out onto the back porch for a smoke, and Marty sits alone at the table, rolling unspoken comebacks for Rust’s words around in his mind like loose marbles.
Still, some part of him knows it’d been the truth.
* * *
Bonanza reruns are humming on the television and Rust has taken up his usual spot wedged and slumped back against one corner of the couch, watching the screen with his fingers braced loosely around his mouth and temple. Marty’s been going back and forth between wading through the backlog of email piled up in his work account and playing a losing game of solitaire, and when he catches sight of the late hour on the clock his mouth cracks open with a wide yawn.
“You about ready for bed?” he asks, shutting down his laptop and rubbing two fingers into one eye until the room blurs around him. “Meds should be kicking in here pretty soon.”
Rust’s doctor had called the week before and weaned him down to half a painkiller, once in the morning and once at night, and Marty’d gone out and bought a pill cutter that very afternoon. He keeps it under lock and key in a filing cabinet in his office, holed up like paraphernalia with three orange prescription bottles that he still dumps out and counts in a private ritual at the end of every night.
“You go on if you’re ready,” Rust says, palming the remote and clicking the television off. “Need to take a shower yet, but then I’ll be in after.”
They’ve fallen into a sort of bedtime routine where it’s either two for one or the second always following the first shortly thereafter. The comforter and sheet gets pulled down, they climb in on their respective sides, situate the pillows however they like and whoever comes in last always hits the lights. Been like that since day one and outside the nightmares that crop up in the darkest hours before daybreak, maybe having somebody a hand’s breadth away isn’t too bad a thing at all.
Marty’s been in his pajamas since nine and slides onto the side furthest from the door, leaving the lamp burning on the other end. He settles and curls up on his side to listen to the shower start up down the hall, lulled somewhat under the spell of the water hitting ceramic but not quite falling beneath the pull of sleep.
Because he does it every night, he wonders about what he and Rust are doing here.
“I don’t usually do this,” Rust had said on the third night after their jailbreak from the hospital, flat on his back with his hair fanned out like a messy halo on the pillow.
“Do what, sleep?” Marty’d mumbled from the other side of the bed, perched on the edge of the mattress and busy digging for something in the night table drawer.
“No,” Rust told him. “Mean sleeping with somebody else.”
“Well, Rust,” Marty said offhand, laughing a little as he unscrewed the lid on a pot of Vicks vapor rub and started massaging some into his right shoulder. “It ain’t no big secret that you never were too hot on the dating scene.”
Rust closed his eyes against the smell of menthol and green sprigs of light shimmering in his vision, line of his throat working easy as he swallowed. “You know I don’t fucking mean it like that, Marty.”
“Uh, yeah, cause that’s definitely what we’re doing here,” Marty snorted, turning to peer at the other man over his shoulder despite the warmth burning at the back of his neck. “Listen, you want some of this shit on your bad arm?”
Rust offered up his right arm without a word and Marty leaned in close, bracing his fingers light around the white dressing taped there to rub some of the ointment into Rust’s elbow, working it up gently around the muscle.
“Not even with Laurie half the time,” Rust said after a string of quiet, watching Marty through his lashes. “Still had trouble sleeping through the night back then, and she’d grind her teeth sometimes, said she’d never but that’s exactly what she fucking did. I’d either go back to my place or end up staring at her living room ceiling til morning.”
Marty stopped his massaging after a moment and blinked, lips parted enough to draw in a breath. “That was over ten fucking years ago,” he said, sitting up a bit. “Are you telling me you haven’t—?”
“None of that shit matters,” Rust said, slurring a little once his pain meds had started to kick in. “I’m just saying, Marty, if I elbow you in the fucking face in the middle of the night, it’s because I ain’t used to any of this.”
“Well rest assured, you sleep like the dead,” Marty said, screwing the top back on the vapor rub and stowing it in the nightstand. “Breathe so quiet sometimes I halfway get to wondering if you’re still living.”
He didn’t mention the handful of times during the previous night where he’d leaned in close to Rust’s face in the dark, waiting for a whisper of warm breath to tickle across his face.
“I wouldn’t go in my sleep,” Rust said, feeling fatigue begin to swallow him down into the bed.
“No,” Marty told him as he twisted off the light. “After all the shit we’ve been through, I don’t imagine you’d have the decency to go quietly at all.”
Rust walks into the bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, sleepy-eyed with his hair already setting in damp waves on top of his head. He stops by the closet to drop his dirty clothes in the basket, and when he turns around and reaches for the light Marty’s opening his mouth before he even knows what hit him.
“Not yet,” he says, pushing up on one elbow while Rust blinks at him in the yellow lamplight. “Come—c’mere for a second. Wanna see how—how it looks now.”
Rust doesn’t say a word but walks over and slowly, slowly slides onto his side of the bed, shifting across the mattress until he’s lying flat on his back. Marty clears his throat a bit and scoots closer until they’re almost touching but not quite, eyes already traveling down the bent crescent moon of a scar cutting crooked through the softer part of his belly and up toward his sternum.
It doesn’t look so mean now that the stitches are out, but it’s still a vibrant and angry shade of pink, lined by those familiar little pinpricks of red where the sutures had been tied and knotted. Marty’s touched it in the few weeks past, having helped Rust rub vitamin E ointment around the edges to help the itching, but it’d been rough and foreign-feeling under his fingers, like the inside seam on a canvas pillow.
“Can I—?” he asks when his hand is already two inches in the air, gaze flickering up to meet Rust’s before dropping back down again.
Rust vaguely nods, stomach rising and falling with every easy breath. “M’already here, Marty,” he says, lids sinking lower. “You don’t need to ask.”
Marty touches the pads of two fingers against the tip of it now, the place where the knife had come to a rest before Rust pulled it free. It’s warm and strangely soft despite the puckered terrain, a lot like the one that stretches across his collarbone, and he wonders if Rust has much sensation left in the tissue there at all.
“Feels kinda numb in a weird way, don’t it?” Marty asks, gently sliding his middle finger down to the widest part where the blade had twisted and changed direction, and Rust’s breath catches light when he does.
“I can still feel it,” he says, eyes dripped shut now. “Not real good, but—yeah.”
Marty remembers watching dark blood well and weep from Rust’s stomach, how hot and wet it’d felt pooling under the palm of his hand. How the nurses had scrubbed it from underneath his nails when he woke up from surgery, already dry and flaking in a weird twist of horror like rough shavings of orange-oxidized metal.
He swallows a little thickly and presses his hand flat against Rust’s belly again, covering most of the scar with a broad palm. There’s only warmth and soft skin and a carved memory now, but Rust is here, and he’s alive, and Marty hates himself for letting his mouth tighten and screw up at the thought, but then he’s also real fucking thankful.
The pad of his thumb swipes over Rust’s hipbone on its own accord and he thinks this is enough, he just needed the reassurance and nothing more, but when he readies to pull back and return to his side of the bed Rust’s right hand is coming up and covering his, settling there in a warm and familiar weight.
“I’ll tell you, Marty,” he says, voice gone a little tight around the edges. “I reckon this isn’t what either of us had in mind, about where we’d end up.” He stops short and blinks his eyes back open, quickly looking away, and Marty’s never heard the man strapped for something to say in his life but Rust only holds onto his hand and presses it against his gut, like he’s trying to anchor the both of them there, fingers curling tighter around Marty’s.
“Fuck,” he breathes out, one word cut rough inside something not quite a laugh. “It ain’t so bad, though—all this. Whatever it is we’ve got going here.”
Marty gently pulls his hand out from under Rust’s and figures he’s made as much peace as he’ll ever make, made it the first night he helped Rust into this bed, and whatever comes next had probably been coming all along. Rust, here and now after everything, who’d come willingly and folded himself into Marty’s hands like a pardon and a privilege, fucked up as they both were and forever gonna be.
He’s half-dizzy with it all but draws himself up closer so he’s looking down into Rust’s eyes, soft and more grey than blue in the yellow light. His lips are parted just the barest little bit and that’s all the invitation Marty needs to reach up and lightly touch the side of Rust’s face, only half-aware of the other man’s fingers coming up to fist in his t-shirt as he closes the space between them and lets their mouths finally meet and brush together.
This time the kiss starts chaste but then Rust opens his mouth and makes it deeper, hand moving down to press into the middle of Marty’s back while one leg draws up in the sheets, and it’s too hard to keep himself braced on one elbow so Marty eases back and pulls Rust with him so they’re facing one another along the center line of the bed, coming right back where they’d left off.
Marty gets a hand braced up around the back of Rust’s neck with his fingers cradled at the base of his skull, letting Rust nip and suck at his bottom lip while their noses bump and slide together, breath still soft but slowly coming faster.
Rust braces one hand against Marty’s chest and drags his mouth down to taste warm and wet on the underside of his jaw, hissing out a sharp swear there when Marty’s hand drags down his back to get a tight handful of ass through soft cotton briefs.
“Gotta get rid of these,” Marty rasps, hooking a thumb up under Rust’s waistband and pulling down, hand skimming over the satin-soft skin and tight muscle there. “Rise up for a second.”
He untangles himself and moves further down the bed while Rust rolls over onto his back, lifting his torso up long enough for Marty to work the briefs down over his hips and to his knees. He pulls them off the rest of the way and throws them to the floor, and he’s seen Rust naked once or twice before but not like this, not getting hard and bathed over in soft light with his stomach clenched tight.
Rust watches as Marty leans back over and slides one hand up his side, bowing over press his mouth to the spot under his navel, turning to trail a soft line of kisses up over the scar and the plane of his chest. When Marty’s mouth brushes over the little hollow at the base of his throat Rust gasps harsh and sudden, sucking in a pinched lungful of air, and Marty smiles to himself before dipping the flat of his tongue there in a move that makes the other man’s hips buck lazy off the bed.
“M-Marty,” Rust says, moaning soft around the name. “Get—get your fucking clothes off, oh fuck, c’mon now.”
Marty nods on an exhale and pulls his shirt over his head, hands gone still when he goes to reach for his sweatpants. They’ve only ever fooled around in the full dark and Rust’s never really seen him before, not like this, and he feels his chest flush deep crimson but Rust isn’t having any of it.
“All that dick swagger you’ve always put on, don’t you go getting modest now,” he says, reaching out so just the pads of his fingers trail over Marty’s side and across the softness of his stomach. “I ain’t your first fuckin prom date.”
The sweatpants come off and then they’re coming back together, a feverish knot of tongue and hands and Rust’s knee jammed up between Marty’s thighs, and when Rust’s fingers snake down to tease around Marty’s cock he groans long and loud, swearing soft in the hot space between them.
“What you want, Marty?” Rust rasps, already sounding halfway wrung out. “Tell me.”
Marty’s eyes snap back open and he finds a different shade of blue staring back, the kind of brightness there intense and unfamiliarly vibrant and something that makes his stomach honest to God flutter in his gut.
“Rust,” he says, half-blinded, and he doesn’t know, doesn’t know how but he’s gotta try, gotta find the words to ask. “Rust, I wanna—oh fuck, I need to—”
“You can have it,” Rust says, just like that, leaning in press the words hot against the corner of Marty’s mouth. “Tell me you got more than Vicks in that fucking drawer.”
“Fuck yeah I do,” Marty says, feeling like all the blood has rushed out of his head, and when he comes back after fishing out a little foil packet and a familiar blue bottle Rust’s eyes are laid on him heavy, slumped back against the pillows with his dick still hard between his legs.
Marty swallows and pops the cap off the lube, feels his jaw start working like it’s hanging off a broken hinge.
“You—you ever?” he asks, sighing breathless as his thoughts swirl around almost too fast to be caught. “Done it like this before?”
“Been a long time, but yeah,” Rust breathes out, gesturing for Marty to move in closer. “Forget the rubber unless you need it, I ain’t got nothing to share.”
“Well me fucking either, Jesus Christ,” Marty says as he slides in close, and he can’t look Rust in the eye now but he slicks his fingers up, holding them there midair like he doesn’t know what to do with them. “This is—shit, this is real fucking weird, man—”
“It ain’t that fucking weird,” Rust says, shifting in the sheets and spreading his legs open wide. “Knowing the shit you used to get up to, I figure you’ve fucked plenty of girls in the ass before. Plus Lutz and Demma liked to talk in the break room, so it’s all the same basic principle with a more gratifying outcome on this end no matter which way you spin it.”
“You mouth off like this every time you get some?” Marty half-laughs, but his dick’s aching hard and he’s ten blocks and two streets past the point for any kind of pillow talk, so he reaches down and slides one slick finger up the crack of Rust’s ass to his taint, and the sound he makes in the back of his throat is downright whorish.
Marty pushes the first finger in without any more warning than that and Rust bites into his lip and fists his hands in the sheets while he lets himself get worked open, sweat shining around his temples the longer it lasts.
“Don’t be trying nothing fancy,” he hisses, grappling at Marty to pull him closer so they’re lying next to one another with Marty’s hand still down between Rust’s legs, up to the third finger now.
A little bit longer and Marty’s done, can’t wait a second longer, and when he pulls his hand away Rust gasps, muscles in his thighs jumping where he’s been braced and straining.
“How are we gonna—?” Marty starts to ask, hand come up to settle on Rust’s stomach while he tries to pry the words out of his throat. Rust has gone quiet and when he finally looks up their eyes brush in the dim light, a touch softer than before, Marty’s still hand rising and falling where it rests alongside a long scar.
“Rust,” he breathes out, fast and frayed around the edges. “Jesus, listen, I—”
“I know, Marty,” is all Rust tells him, reaching out to brush the back of his hand with the pads of his fingers.
Things seem to move in suspended liquid time after that. Slow, slow, and Marty’s never been more grateful for feeling like he was wading through a wide open water dream, nothing but the two of them now, nobody but him and Rust hidden here in a secret place behind four walls, stripped down and bared for nobody but each other.
Marty kneels in the spread between Rust’s legs and presses a kiss to the inside of his knee, trailing his fingers light up the backs of his thighs, reveling a little in the way gooseflesh raises wherever his hands travel.
“You tell me if I’m hurting you,” he says and Rust nods, letting Marty get one hand braced up under his hips. “Say the word and I’ll stop.”
“Quit your fuckin' worrying, Marty,” Rust rasps. “Come on now.”
“Still don’t wanna take the chance,” Marty says, shivering under his own touch as he takes his cock in hand and lines up. He breathes in long and deep and then with Rust halfway pleading for him to do it, he fists himself and pushes forward into him.
Marty doesn’t stop until he’s pressed flush against Rust’s ass, could fucking cry over how good it feels, and when he slides out and pivots back in Rust’s fingers are already digging bruises into his upper arms, line of his brow crumpled and pulled tight.
“You alright?” Marty manages to choke out, and when Rust nods he bows over him until he feels warm breath on the side of his face, braces his arms on either side and starts to move. Marty keeps the pace as slow as he can go, gets one hand tangled up in Rust’s hair and rocks into him deep and easy, panting and pressing his mouth soft against Rust’s shoulder when the other man’s legs hitch up around his waist.
“You can do me better than that,” Rust says hoarsely, letting go of Marty’s arms to lace his hands around the back of his neck, pulling him in closer so the tips of their noses brush together while Marty thrusts into him. “Come on and give it to me.”
Marty growls and shifts his weight forward and fucks back into him deep, and Rust shudders underneath him, thighs clenching around his hips like a vice. “Fuck, fuck, right there, Jesus fuckin—”
“Right there?” Marty asks, feeling the heat curl and spark through his body every time he reels back and rocks in deeper.
“Fuck yes, don’t you stop,” Rust gasps, eyes clenched shut now, and when he reaches down and grabs the other man’s ass Marty shifts into the kind of rhythm that he knows will push them both gasping and headlong to the end.
He tries to stay mindful of Rust’s stomach and reigns himself back best he can, but the thrusts start jolting Rust further up the bed and by the sounds he’s making it ain’t anything but something good, biting off choked little moans that get caught high in his throat. Memory touches a thought in his head, then, and Marty bends around to graze his teeth along the side of Rust’s neck, dragging his mouth back to that familiar little hollow and mouthing soft there until Rust arches up into it with another choked gasp, fingers raking fast up the other man’s back.
Marty wants to kiss every sound Rust makes, stow away every little hitching breath and shuddering sigh, but he can only press his mouth close against Rust’s when he feels the fire start to build, breathing in whatever he breathes out while the thrusts start to spin out ragged and sloppy.
The only warning Rust gives before he tips over the edge is a rapid rush of breath, one long sigh exhaled in a burst of release and then his thighs are clenching tight and he’s coming hot and sticky between them, mouth dropped open wide and pressed against Marty’s while the other man fucks him through it.
“Marty,” Rust gasps out in one word broke even, and then Marty’s gone, he’s gone and he’s shaking as he finally lets himself go through Rust, vision clouded over with black that bursts in front of his eyes like sunspots. He rides it out slow until the adrenaline starts to wane and subside, rocking easy against Rust with wet heat still blossomed up between them. A spike of fear shoots through him when he drops down against the other man’s body but Rust only holds onto him and keeps him there, fingers on one hand come up to wrap around the back of Marty’s neck while his legs sink back down into the sheets.
“I’m alright,” he pants softly as his eyes drop shut, following the line of Marty’s spine with his thumb, pressing into it gentle like he’s grounding a loose current. “Fuck, that was something.”
“That a compliment coming out of you?” Marty laughs a little breathless, turning his face to press a kiss near Rust’s ear. “Better than I fuckin dreamed.”
“You been dreaming about this?” Rust poses after a few moments, fingers trailing up and down Marty’s sides now, drawing invisible shapes across his ribs and shoulders.
Marty could tell him. Could say yeah, Rust, and that’d be the fucking truth and more, but they’re pressed so close now he thinks he might be able to feel a long scar searing like a brand against his stomach, and maybe it ain’t so much about what he’s been dreaming, but what he wants to keep dreaming after he wakes up.
“Don’t you go gettin' it in your head to leave,” Marty whispers against the side of Rust’s throat, so quiet he wonders if the words carry over the thrum-beat of their pounding hearts. “I need you here, now.”
Rust goes suddenly still and lets out a long breath, one hand cupped warm around Marty’s side. “I’m not going anywhere, Marty,” he says, pitched velvet-soft. “Probably couldn’t even if I tried.”
Another long moment passes and then his voice is coming back in, quiet but threaded with some of the same softness from before. “Thank you.”
They pull apart and clean up best they can before tangling back together on one side of the bed in the mess of sheets, still washed over in lamplight bleeding over from the nightstand. Rust is curled up on his side, head tucked up somewhere under Marty’s chin, and when he feels laughter rumbling soft underneath him he blinks his eyes back open.
“What’s funny?” he murmurs, feeling Marty’s hand come up to palm the dip between his hip and ribcage.
“Nothin,” Marty chuckles, letting out a soft little hoo at the tail-end that ruffles through Rust’s hair. “Just feel happy, I guess, is all.”
“Good,” Rust tells him, pressing a kiss to his bare shoulder, hand come up to rest in the middle of his chest. “Reckon that makes two of us.”